The invention relates to methods and to apparatuses for registering (which term should be understood as meaning taking into account and totalizing the prices of articles purchased) and checking articles, and a particularly important (though not exclusive) application thereof lies in self-service super- and hypermarkets.
At present, a major complaint made by the customers of large stores of this type is the waiting time at the checkout, as made necessary by the need to check articles purchased one by one, to register them, and to pay for them. By using scanning devices for optically reading the bar codes carried by each article, a considerable saving in time is obtained by avoiding the need for the clerk to key in each individual article code or price on the checkout machine. However, because each article is verified by an employee, such a solution is merely a palliative since the time taken by each customer to pass through the checkout is substantially proportional to the number of articles purchased, given that payment time generally represents only a small fraction of the total time spent at the checkout. Taking account of articles purchased requires all of them to be placed on a moving surface, each of them to be verified individually, and then they need to be reloaded.
Another source of dissatisfaction is the near impossibility for a customer to check that the price actually taken into account does indeed correspond to that shown on the shelves. Finally, customers are reticent because they can evaluate the amount they are going to need to pay only quite approximately until the total is displayed at the checkout.
Apparatuses that have been proposed in the past for enabling customers to do their own checking before reaching the checkout solve the second problem in part only and have no effect on the first.